Review: Duskers (PC)

October 1st, 2015 at 1:30 pm -

Duskers is a brilliant roguelike that places you in control of remotely piloted drones for the  purpose of scavenging, reconing, and surviving. The premise behind Duskers is to find out what happened to humanity and the other alien races that once existed in outer space.

The stars have been abandoned and turned into mass graves. Space itself is riddled with vacant space stations, wrecked spacecraft and other debris that can be boarded and then explored for the purpose of understanding what really happened.

Every time you travel to a new location (i.e. space station, etc.),  the game provides a set of logs that were left behind by the missing inhabitants. Some of these logs are corrupt, while others  are in perfect, working condition. Your job is to siphon as many of these logs as possible to construct a logical explanation behind the disappearance of everything.

Nothing in Duskers is handed to you; you have to work for everything. You start out with three basic drones that have the bare minimum for skills and equipment.  As you explore and salvage the abandoned environments,  your drones will gain advanced skills and technology to make them more efficient.

Combat can be rather tricky in the beginning. You must use special drones that can detect motion to determine whether or not you should open or even enter a specific location. By using your three starter drones consecutively, you can open and close multiple locations at once to either trap and/or neutralize enemy threats.

What makes Duskers’ gameplay so unique is the way you operate and control each drone. It truly captures the remote-control experience; it feels like you are sitting in a remote location and controlling drones by use of a (Shell) computer terminal. The terminal itself comes in handy when you want to initiate commands on a much larger scale.

Typing in command strings to operate your drones is a blast, and the gameplay difficulty is really based on how fast your typing skills are. The commands the player inputs into the terminal are very basic. But help menus do exist to assist the player with the fundamentals of operating the terminal. Plus, there’s a tutorial that will hold your hand through a mock mission to help you grasp the game’s concept.

Duskers has a slight learning curve due to the DOS-like interface used to command your drones. But as long as you have some knowledge of DOS, the game shouldn’t be too difficult to play.  Moreover, things get a bit easier as you progress through the solar system. Once all your drones are destroyed, you will have to face the same challenges again. Luckily, the game world is randomly generated and is never the same twice.

When you’re not focused on the enemy (which does exist), you’re taking care of equipment breakdowns and failures. Maintaining your drones is key to surviving;  repairing and upgrading your drones is as simple as salvaging scrap from other locations and then using it on your drones.

You should never take anything for granted even when things seem to be going well. It’s also important to always maintenance your drones to keep them in functional shape. If you don’t, they run the risk of malfunctioning during a mission. The player is given the freedom to build and then customize each drone as they see fit. Every drone is capable of using whatever skills you ‘program’ them to use, so the same drone that is used for operating generators, can also be the same drone that can do motion detection or even interfacing.

Duskers’ graphics are absolutely beautiful for what they are; most notably when you are operating multiple drones manually. Each drone sees the world differently; some operate by reading heat signatures, while others see the world in black and white. They also use equipment such as microphones to record and then playback sounds from missions, to name just one.Duskers is a truly diverse game that allows the player to do just about anything they want. And thanks to the roguelike gameplay, the player is guaranteed a new experience every time they start the game over. Now that is worth the price of admission by itself.

James ‘Daripp3r’ Pittaro
Platform: PC

System Requirements
Minimum:
OS: Windows XP+
Processor: SSE2 instruction set support.
Graphics: DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities; generally everything made since 2004 should work
DirectX: Version 9.0
Hard Drive: 200 MB available space

Developer: Misfits Attic
Publisher: Misfits Attic
ESRB: N/A
Price: $19.99

Duskers’ Official Website: http://duskers.misfits-attic.com/